As soon as we went on hiatus, Cindy and I flew to the South of France for an international TV festival in Cannes. Once a series completed five years, there were enough shows for a big syndication sale, and our job was to drum up excitement. But neither of us looked like cheerleaders as we checked into the Hôtel du Cap, the famous old resort in Cap Ferret. We were jet-lagged, and the gray skies and chilly temperatures sapped whatever enthusiasm we had left.
The hotel was empty. Although we probably weren’t the only people there, it felt like it. As we wandered from the front desk and down the cavernous hallways, the former nineteenth-century mansion reminded me of The Shining. I turned to Cindy and chanted, “Redrum, redrum.” She gave me a dirty look. She was sensitive about such things and didn’t want me to mess with her.
I suggested taking a walk around hotel’s expansive grounds before we faced meetings with international TV buyers and reporters at the convention. We followed a path along flowerbeds revealing the first colors of spring and past clusters of thick trees. Then we turned a corner and found ourselves standing at the entrance to a graveyard. But this was no ordinary graveyard. The headstones all were very small. We didn’t know what to make of it.
“Redrum,” I said.
“Shut up,” Cindy said.
I thought they might be for the hotel staff. Or perhaps some of the hotel’s guests.
“Don’t say that,” said Cindy.
She figured out the graves were for the hotel’s pets. As an animal lover, she thought that was sweet.
The walk re-energized us through most of the press conference, though I had trouble with a Dutch journalist who said his people didn’t think Laverne & Shirley was funny. “I don’t think the Dutch are known for their sense of humor,” I snapped. Later, at dinner with some TV executives from Belgium, Cindy and I crashed, literally, head first onto our plates, sound asleep. We blamed it on the time change. I suppose we did our job anyway. Laverne & Shirley broke new syndication records.
Back home, as I recounted the trip to Artie, his eyes lit up at my description of the South of France. Well-traveled, he had been through the South of France many times before, including the Hôtel du Cap, and my enthusiasm for Europe inspired him to suggest another type of trip: motorcycling across Europe. Just the two of us. Going wherever our mood and the road took us.
I had never done anything remotely like that in my life. Who lived that kind of life outside of characters in novels? Artie did. To me, it was one more reason to fall in love with this man. His father had been a traveling salesman, and Artie liked to rack up the miles, too. In the short time I had known him, he had periodically called and said, “How about Austria?” “How about Istanbul?” I was employed Monday through Friday. He, on the other hand, picked up and left for two or three months on a whim.
I said yes. The motorcycle adventure was something I would have done in my early 20s but I already was a mother then. However, now was even better. I had the time, the money, and the perfect traveling companion. Artie and I flew to Paris, where we spent a week with Jim Brooks and his then-wife, Holly, and Lorne and his girlfriend, Susan, who all happened to be there at the same time. It was a party.
Then, one morning, after bidding good-bye to our friends, Artie and I stood in front of the Hôtel Plaza Athénée, secured two small suitcases to the back of his rented BMW motorcycle, and took off. Someone asked where we were headed and Artie simply said, “South.”
The ensuing days were wonderful, amazing. Avoiding highways, we drove at a leisurely pace on back roads through small villages and gorgeous countryside. I had a Michelin guide, but we stayed in whatever charming place we found, whether it was a five-star hotel or an inexpensive pension. Every four or five days, we boxed up our dirty clothes and sent them to his place in New York. Artie preferred to buy a new T-shirt and underwear rather than do laundry.
After nearly two weeks, we parked the bike in Avignon so I could fly to Boston for an event that nearly qualified as a family get-together. My brother and Jerry Belson were workshopping The Roast, a play they had written about an old comedian whose tribute dinner is spoiled when dark secrets are revealed. It starred Rob and Peter Boyle, and Rob’s father, Carl, directed. Was it odd that we were all still working together? Not to me. That’s show business.
I watched from the back of the theater and gave notes. I don’t think they helped. In May, the play went to Broadway and closed after three days. (As it closed, the sign for Cats went up.) My brother blamed his and Jerry’s inability to agree on an ending. I’m sure he was right. Onstage, you have to tie up the loose ends neatly and send the audience home with a resolution they like. In real life, as was evident, that’s not as easy. I was familiar with indecision. My life was a play in the midst of a rewrite. But was that bad? I didn’t think so. In fact, I had asked my therapist why I had left a marriage that was comfortable and predictable for a great big question mark.
“Were you happy?” he asked.
“No,” I said.
He shrugged.
That cost me a fortune, but he was right. Sometimes the most complicated questions have simple answers.
Were you happy?
I was learning that I didn’t have to have everything figured out. Often the point was to live and see what happened. Artie was a great person with whom to discuss such matters. He thought about the big questions and read deep books. My approach was far simpler. I remember once laughing at our differences when I noticed the books we were carrying through an airport. He had Stendhal’s The Red and the Black and I had Xaviera Hollander’s The Happy Hooker.
After Boston, Artie and I flew to Washington, D.C., and met up with Carrie and Harrison Ford for the premiere of The Empire Strikes Back. The dressy event was a benefit for the Special Olympics, a favorite organization of mine. My first husband worked for the Special Olympics in Albuquerque, and I had once volunteered as a “hugger” at the finish line during one of his events. I recommend the experience to everyone.
The D.C. premiere was a hit with everyone except, ironically, the Special Olympics kids. The spaceships and Wookiees traumatized them. Artie and I tagged along with Carrie, Paul, and Harrison to London, where they attended a royal screening of the movie. Not among the invitees, we stayed at our hotel, where Artie left the bathtub running while we went out for dinner. When we returned, the place was flooded. We spent the night on our hands and knees, cleaning the goddamn hotel room. It was very Laverne & Garfunkel.
Carrie and Paul and Artie and I then traveled to Portugal, where we were engulfed by a dense fog that never lifted. When Carrie and Paul began grating on each other, Artie and I broke away and found a hotel that had been a monastery four or five centuries earlier. The rooms were small, austere, and claustrophobic—perfect for decades of meditative silence. Artie liked that, but I didn’t. Late at night, we got into an argument and decided to leave. But locating the monk or night manager—whatever he was—at that hour to check us out was next to impossible. I think we ended up finding it humorous.
By the time we picked up the motorcycle in Avignon, we had patched things up. Our bike broke down on the way to Eric and Tanya Idle’s house in Cotignac and all I could talk about after we arrived was how I had fixed it. Again, another life lesson for which I had Artie to thank.
We also visited my friend Carol Caldwell in a one-horse village in the French countryside where, it seemed, only two things happened: In the morning the sheep were herded out over a hill and at night they were brought back. They wore bells around their necks. We would hear them coming and going like a rustic symphony.
From Carol’s, we drove south to Nice and into Italy. As we crossed the border, Artie and I were struck by some of the contrasts: how well the French roads had been marked, the silence of the French countryside, and then the noise in Italy, where people honked and screamed at one another. We knew we were among Italians.
Then the best scenery of all: We climbed through the Great St. Bernard Pass in the Alps and crosse
d into Switzerland. Inspired by the majesty of the views and unable to contain myself, I burst into songs from The Sound of Music. Artie reminded me that I wasn’t Julie Andrews.
“Please don’t sing,” he said.
I wasn’t insulted.
We rendezvoused with Tracy and my niece Wendy in Geneva. We picked them up at the airport, rented a car, and resumed our travels with one girl on the back of the bike and the other in the car with me. I taught both girls, recently turned sixteen, to drive on the country roads in France. Why take lessons in the San Fernando Valley when you could practice finding sixteenth-century cathedrals in Annecy?
As we headed back to Paris, we ate lunch on the side of the road. At dinner, Artie harmonized with the girls. In Paris, we showed them Notre-Dame and walked along the Seine. I was living a dream, yet it was my life, and when it was time to go home, I felt recharged and ready, sort of. Tracy admired me for being adventurous, but really, Artie deserved the credit. He had given me a gift. He had opened my eyes to travel and exposed me to a new approach to life.
The rest was up to me.
CHAPTER 29
Taking Direction
Penny playing the tambourine onstage with Paul Simon and Mayor Ed Koch at New York’s Palladium Theater in 1980
Marshall personal collection
WITH THE HIGHS came lows. It was fall 1980, and I had flown into New York to see Paul Simon perform at the Palladium. I arrived in the grip of a deep depression. Sometimes the feeling is beyond control. This was like a strong current that took me out to sea. Deep down, I knew that the stuff I had run away from by going to Europe was catching up to me. Luckily, my friends were sympathetic. Paul suffered from bouts of darkness, and Carrie had a whole wardrobe of mood swings hanging in her closet. Before the show, Paul said, “Why don’t you come onstage and sing at the end when I play ‘Amazing Grace’?”
“No thanks,” I said. “I’m not a singer.”
“Penny, we’ll have a large gospel choir backing you up—as well as Mayor Koch,” he said. “No one will hear you.”
“They won’t know who I am,” I said, sounding depressed.
“What are you, nuts?” he said. “Come on out and see what it feels like,” he said.
After turning in an amazing two-hour-plus show, Paul got to “Amazing Grace” and motioned to me on the side. Reluctantly, I walked out and stood next to him, and I will forever be glad I did. As we sang, the cheering from the audience was like a gust of wind that blew away some of my depression.
I wasn’t cured, but it made dealing with the stuff that had depressed me a little easier when I got back to L.A. I was still a little sad about Rob. Every so often feelings of remorse would sneak up on me. My mother was also fading, and that was not so nice. And then there was the show.
While I had been off motorcycling with Artie, my brother had huddled with the show’s producers and studio executives and decided to give Laverne & Shirley a reboot. For its sixth season, they reset the show in 1964—just after the Kennedy assassination and just in time for the Beatles—and moved everyone to Los Angeles. They also added Ed Marinaro as stuntman Sonny St. Jacques and Leslie Easterbrook as our wannabe actress neighbor.
I thought the whole thing was a mistake. L.A. didn’t make sense to me. Even poor people there have a house with a lawn and a couple of trees. They dress like they’re on vacation. They don’t look poor.
Laverne and Shirley were poor. That was part of their appeal. They were regular folks. I thought they should go to New York, where they would face new struggles and we could use different actors. But my opinion counted not so much. In the season’s opening episode, titled “Not Quite New York,” Laverne and Shirley lost their bottle-capping jobs to machines and moved to Burbank, California, as did everyone else.
Despite my criticism, we still did some excellent work, including the episode “I Do, I Do.” In it, two British rockers try to marry Laverne and Shirley so they can stay in the United States and escape the high British taxes. Eric Idle and Peter Noone from Herman’s Hermits played the rockers, and I added songwriter Stephen Bishop to their band for authenticity. Lenny and Squiggy arrived dressed as Simon and Garfunkel and went looking for Mary Jane in the bedroom. Numerous other drug jokes kept this show from being re-run again.
At one point, I was supposed to play the intro to the Rolling Stones’ classic “Satisfaction” on the guitar. I got lessons from Crosby, Stills & Nash’s Stephen Stills and Snuffy Walden, a rocker who was becoming one of TV’s leading composers. Stephen Bishop also tried to teach me. I never got it right. Finally, Eric Idle said, “Forget the fingering and just pretend you mean it.”
That worked.
That season I also directed two episodes: “The Dating Game” and “But Seriously Folks.” It wasn’t my first time behind the camera. I had directed “The Duke of Squiggman” the previous season. I didn’t think it was a big deal. By this time, everyone had directed—Cindy, Michael, the first assistant director, the camera coordinator, and even the script girl. So when they looked in my direction, I said, “Sure, I’ll do it.”
Why not? It was easy. After a hundred-plus episodes, everyone knew their characters. How many doors can you walk through? “Go do what you’re supposed to do,” I told everyone. “I’ll tell you if it’s wrong.”
Laverne & Shirley writer-producers Marc Sotkin and Arthur Silver also asked me to direct the pilot for their new sitcom, Working Stiffs, starring Jimmy Belushi and Michael Keaton. “Well you’re down at the bottom of the barrel, aren’t you?” I said. After it sold, though, John Belushi yelled at me. “What are you doing putting my brother on television?” he said. “He’s a better actor than I am.”
This was an exciting time to be at Paramount. In addition to Laverne & Shirley and Happy Days, Bosom Buddies, Mork & Mindy, and Taxi were among the shows produced there. On any given day, Tom Hanks, Danny DeVito, Henry Winkler, Robin Williams, and I were poking our heads into one another’s sets or grabbing lunch together in the commissary.
I didn’t like the studio’s commissary. It was new, and it blocked the straight path we had taken for years to our parking spaces. All of a sudden we had to walk all the way around to Poughkeepsie, you know, and it took forty minutes because of the little decorative squares of grass they put in the cement. Jim Brooks got tired of hearing me bitch about it.
“Why complain to me?” he said. “Call Barry Diller and tell him we need the Gower Gate open.”
“Okay,” I said. “Give me his number.”
What he failed to mention was that Barry was the chairman and chief executive officer of Paramount; he’d been appointed to the position in 1974, at age thirty-two. He was brilliant, demanding, and tough. But I didn’t know who he was. For all I knew, Jim said to call him because he was in charge of parking lots—which, I guess, he sort of was.
I got on the phone and asked for Barry Diller. His assistant picked up and for some reason put me through.
“Hi, this is Penny Marshall,” I said. “I work on the show Laverne & Shirley.”
“Hello,” he said.
“Are you Barry Diller?”
“Yes.”
“You know that new commissary you built?” I said.
“Yes, isn’t it lovely?”
“Well, yeah, it’s sort of nice,” I said. “The secretary’s heels get stuck in the grass but that’s another thing. Look, I work on Stage 20 and we can’t get to the parking space because of the commissary and your little squares of cement. So could you please open Gower Gate?”
“Hmmm.”
“Look, the TV department is carrying the studio right now, and you’re wasting money by making us take so much time to walk. We all could work longer if we could get to our cars quicker.”
At the end of the day Barry opened the gate and left it open for about a year. He couldn’t figure out who I was and why I mattered, and furthermore why or how I knew all the same people he knew: Warren Beatty, Jack Nicholson, and even David Geffen. Later, we be
came friends. I loved and trusted him. He’s the most honest person I’ve ever met. And like me, he’s committed to the work.
When the season ended, Artie was off on his own someplace, as periodically happened with my peripatetic friend, but now I had the travel bug. I asked one of our producers, Chris Thompson, to meet me in Athens, after he dropped off his grandmother in Yugoslavia. We saw the sights there, then went to Mykonos, and then on to Italy, including Lake Como. Finally, I told Tracy to come to London, where, now bored with Chris, I pointed him toward Paris and Tracy and her friend Mark Getty and I caught a flight to Salzburg and then drove back to Rome before venturing to outlying cities in search of our Italian ancestors.
We ended up on a Sunday morning in a little town called San Martino sulla Marricina, where we asked locals if they knew anyone named Masciarelli. Everyone there said they were Masciarelli. It was like the scene in Spartacus. They broke into the hall of records, but didn’t find any close relatives of mine.
Later that summer, I rafted down the Grand Canyon with a group that included Jeffrey Katzenberg, producers Don Simpson and Craig Baumgarten, Tony Danza, and some of their wives and girlfriends. Director Tony Scott arrived late, walked into the canyon, and bodysurfed down the river until he caught up. On our way out, Don sprinted the nine miles to the top, whereas I huffed and puffed, stopped for a cigarette, and then started up again. Other vacationers on the trail were stunned to see me.
“Hey, Laverne, what are you doing here?” one guy said.
“Trying to get the fuck out,” I replied.
In truth, I enjoyed myself. It was like I was back in junior high or camp. I had always liked hanging around with the guys, and they liked me, too.
CHAPTER 30
Old Friends
Penny with her close friend John Belushi in New York in 1976. John passed away in 1982.
Jack Winter / Judy Belushi
THE END OF THE SUMMER was always bittersweet. As a child, it meant going home after camp, saying good-bye to friends, and starting school. For the past six years, my life had followed a similar pattern. I had to dial back on the fun and return to ten-hour days on Paramount’s Stage 20. But thanks to good friends Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel, I managed to squeeze a little extra fun into my calendar before starting the seventh season of Laverne & Shirley. Who could blame me?
My Mother Was Nuts Page 14